Anorexia and Shabbat

Campus & Community, The Conspiracy on newvoices.org by Jourdan Stein

Third grade lunch at Solomon Schechter Jewish Day School. All my friends are sitting around eating Cheetos and sharing sandwiches. Me, I’m staring at the clock waiting for the little and the big hand to both land on the twelve so that I can throw the untouched lunch my mother packed me into the trash can. For as long as I can remember I have had an aversion to food, which is funny since almost all of my memories from childhood include food. When I look back and think about holidays I spent surrounded by family, I think about how many Rosh Hashanahs at my zaida’s house I spent saying I don’t like apples and honey, how many Hannukahs I refused to eat latkes, and how many Purims I convinced myself I didn’t like Hamantashen. I don’t remember the discussions we had at the table, but I do remember the anxiety I felt about eating the meal in front of me. I love being Jewish, I have always felt that it is one of things about me that makes me special. But there is another thing about me that has always made me special—anorexia.

These early memories of food and Judaism are just the beginning of a life filled with memories of feeling pride in starvation. Food, or lack of it, has taken me down a long, dark road that is now slowly turning upward. It started with throwing my lunch out in elementary school. Then skipping dinner the 3 nights a week I had dance in middle school. By high school I was eating under 800 calories a day, and by the start of college 500. By the time I sought treatment I was living only on caffeine. I know this sounds implausible to those of you without an eating disorder, but it’s not like people didn’t notice. I lost weight, then when people got too concerned, gained it back only to lose all of it and more again. I honestly have no idea what started my eating disorder. I do, however, know why it took me so long to seek treatment. Anorexia served as a protector for me. I needed nothing and no one. Nobody could hurt me more than I could hurt myself. I created a wall between me and the rest of the world through anorexia. The big problem started, though, in college when starvation was no longer enough to protect me from the world.

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